In the music space today, there are a number of applications and services that tackle the problem of discovering new music. Users look for new content such as new music tracks, new games, new apps, new movies, new stickers on messaging apps and new media such as animated GIFs.
Spotify is one of the applications which is enabled to create around 1.5 billion playlists targeting a large set of different customer profile such as workout enthusiasts, commuters, millennial generation, and young parents. It has also developed advanced profiling of users based on age, gender, rich location and behavioral data, moods, music trends and many more aspects. It has lately introduced weekly discover playlist based on recommendations. Music discovery is seen as a very important pillar of Spotify. The strategy that Spotify seems to be pursuing is based on Big Data, i.e. they are trying to make sense of the extremely large set of data they have in order to build a relationship about between user profiles, context and musical tastes.
Another recent music discovery application is Shazam. When people hear a song that they like or are intrigued about, they can pull Shazam and the song is recognized. Based on the number of times a particular song is shazamed in a given location, the application is able to tell which new songs are the most popular new songs. Their data can therefore predict the success of new artists.
In the aforesaid examples, the user is expected to pull their device, click on the application, search, wait and listen. Those services require that the user make the conscious decision to discover music. The user is active and the process is not effortless.
Interestingly, radio is still today the most important medium for new music discovery. Radio is a passive music discovery service. The user simply needs to turn the radio on, choose a channel and sit back (or in many cases, drive). But it is very rare that the listener likes all the music being played. If the music is really disliked, the user either suffers the pain of listening to the entire song or changes channel. The process involves effort.
In the present technology, it is required to integrate with the telecom network to play music during the call over mobile network. Hence, there are limitations of buying timely subscriptions and that too for playing specific tone, every time a user calls on that number.
Also, currently, discovery of songs based on user's context and certain parameters such as time and date, weather, contact name of the person called, calendar event, geo-location, particular action that the end-user is doing, etc. does not exist.